Ontology: Use and Abuse

This paper is a critical analysis of the use of ontology as an instrument to specify the semantics of a document. The paper argue that not only is a logic of the type used in ontology insufficient for such a purpose, but that the very idea that meaning is a property of a document that can be expressed and stored independently of the interpretation activity is misguided. The paper proposes, in very general lines, a possible alternative view of meaning as modification of context and shows that many current approaches to meaning, from ontology to emergent semantics, can be seen as spacial cases of this approach, and can be analyzed from a very general theoretical framework. In his book What do you care what other people think? the physicist Richard Feynmann remembers the way his father used to teach him about birds on their hiking trips together: “See that bird?” he says “It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) “Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: AMR
• Authors: Simone Santini
• Keywords: AMR 2007, Multimedia, Ontology, Ontology Insufficient, Possible Alternative View